


Salvation

by saunatonttu



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Childhood Friends, Félix's POV, Gen, Golden Deer Route spoilers, Shared Grief, dimi/felix is vague but i tagged it anyway, minor BL route supports spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 01:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20201791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saunatonttu/pseuds/saunatonttu
Summary: Four friends reunite at the Gronder Field.Proper warnings inside.





	Salvation

**Author's Note:**

> Golden Deer Route specific spoilers, aka Major Character Death. Some (hinted) spoilers from BL route, too.

How fitting it was that the four of them should come together at the Gronder Field, the historic site of the bloody Battle of the Eagle and Lion. Where they had battled together as a team five years ago as members of the Blue Lions house. It was before the three of them had left their leader behind in search of different experiences – different education. It hadn’t been supposed to mean anything – and yet, that choice had torn them away from the once proud leader of the Blue Lions entirely.

Felix’s heart weighed in his chest like a pile of bricks as he trudged forward across the field. The fires were dying down, and the smoke was starting to clear out, but breathing wasn’t any easier. Felix’s muscles ached, burned like the dying fires, and yet there was a place he still needed to reach and be at regardless of his body’s wishes for rest.

_He’s here. Dimitri’s here._

The thought trickled through him like an ice cold droplet of water, making Felix’s insides quake with nausea. The name of his once closest friend twisted his gut, and the grief he had suppressed all along was the closest it had ever been to breaking out of the prison Felix had caged it in.

Ingrid and Sylvain followed him not too far behind, both as silent as Felix himself. Even Sylvain had the sense to not fill the silence with any superfluous attempts at lifting the mood. That left them with a somber feeling hovering over them, pressing down like an oppressive parent’s hand.

They had made their choices all those months ago when they had made their way to Garreg Mach for their class reunion. Each had abandoned their families, their kingdom – but never had they thought they’d been abandoning their friend, too.

It felt like betrayal, now. A betrayal made without full knowledge – but a betrayal nevertheless. Felix tasted it on his tongue, felt it in every fiber of his being.

Dimitri was supposed to have been dead for five years.

How could he have been so wrong about that?

When they found him, the crown prince of Faerghus was already down, several spears stuck in him between cracked and bloodstained metal. The stench of death and burning grass hung heavy in the air, and even someone as accustomed to it as Felix had to wheeze in a steadying breath.

Only when they got closer, Felix realized there was another sound over the crackling fire and the escaping Imperials. So faint he might have missed it if his senses weren’t still in full combat mode.

Someone’s breathing – wheezing, barely there breathing.

Felix’s heart stuttered as he hastened his steps. Someone so impaled with spears couldn’t possibly still be clinging to life – surely, this was just a simple retrieval of an old childhood friend’s corpse, and nothing more–

”Oh, Goddess,” Ingrid whispered in horror. ”He’s still alive.”

”No way,” Sylvain muttered right beside her. ”He can’t be.”

Felix knew Ingrid was right as surely as he knew his own heartbeat, as surely as he felt the steady nausea climbing up his throat. He had never seen Glenn’s corpse, had never been privy to his death the way Dimitri had been, but the nausea now was similar to what he’d felt at the sight of the pieces of Glenn’s bloody armour that had been returned to the Fraldarius household.

When he bent down beside the still quivering body of his childhood friend, Felix wasn’t entirely surprised to see Dimitri’s eye flutter open. Despite himself, Felix’s attention focused solely on that, casting aside the blood in Dimitri’s greasy hair and the eyepatch that barely covered the other eye.

As surely as the sun rose from the east, Dimitri’s eye stared up at him. At them. With all the exhaustion from his life packed into the pitiful stare of a dying man. Hatred had been washed away, and only bone-deep pain remained.

Whatever Felix had thought he might find in the dimming blue eyes, it hadn’t been this. And he hadn’t been prepared. Neither had Ingrid nor Sylvain, considering the shallow inhales Felix heard from them.

”Felix…?” Dimitri’s voice was so much deeper than what Felix remembered. So much more tired. _I should have been looking for you_, Felix thought, and the bitterness that rose to his throat burned. Dimitri’s eye shifted, this time towards the other two. ”Sylvain, Ingrid…?”

Then, Dimitri laughed. A hoarse, nearly hysterical laugh that made his whole body shake despite the spears stuffed into him. It settled down soon enough, as his body had no strength for such bursts anymore, and Dimitri exhaled. ”Of all the ghosts… to come greet me in death,” he murmured, his voice resigned into hopeless acceptance, ”I suppose… you’re the most fitting ones.”

Felix resented the shiver that Dimitri’s words sent through him. ”Idiot,” he said, but his voice was much too weak to hold the intended bite, ”we’re not your damn ghosts.”

”I missed that,” Dimitri said, eye slipping shut for a second before opening again. It glanced at Felix, tired but soft, before resettling somewhere beside him. A few seconds passed as Dimitri wheezed in a breath. ”Sylvain… what… what in the blazes are you wearing?”

Felix glanced at Sylvain, whose hand had gone to rub at the back of his neck in forced act of sheepishness. ”Why, Your Highness,” Sylvain said with pretended cheer, though Felix heard the underlying trembling, ”don’t tell me you forgot the ball already? The dance competition before it?”

”Ball…?” Dimitri’s confusion was the exhausted kind, and Felix’s eyes returned to him to see Dimitri’s face subtly furrowed with the feeling. ”That was… back…”

”It was five years ago, Your Highness,” Ingrid kindly interjected, her voice soft and her face undoubtedly a mirror of all the sadness Glenn’s death had brought upon her. Felix couldn’t bear to turn to look at that face, so instead he stared at Dimitri’s and tried to keep himself in check.

Even if the feeling that he was looking at the Dimitri he had known all those years back clawed at him. Even if it felt like only in death Dimitri was finally who he had been deep inside the shell the Duscur Tragedy had molded him into. The Dimitri he had--

No, Felix could not think that, or else the last bit of his composure would break.

”Remember, boar,” he said. ”You and this idiot over here were both participants. I’ll admit, it was something worth witnessing. I always thought I’d get to hold it against you one day.”

”Hey now, Felix,” Sylvain said. ”Don’t be so mean. Professor Manuela said His Highness over here had ’an interesting technique’, didn’t she?”

”I don’t recall that,” Felix snorted. ”I only remember this boar’s face when he saw he had to face you in the competition. And yours, too.”

Dimitri laughed, and this time it was a gentler sound. ”I do… remember something like that… but how does that…?” Dimitri lifted a hand weakly to gesture at Sylvain’s dancer’s get-up. ”Explain that…?”

”Well,” Sylvain said, and Felix grimaced at the nonsense he knew was going to come out of his mouth, ”it means I decided that dancing was my calling, y’know? All the girls suddenly flocked to me like crazy after _that_ change in aesthetics, so… I ran away from home and made a living out of cheering pretty girls up.”

”Ah,” Dimitri sighed, and it left his body trembling afterwards. Felix took in the sight of the fresh blood against the black armour. ”That does sound like you.”

”Hey,” Sylvain protested. ”You didn’t need to accept that so fast, you know!”

”Why wouldn’t he?” Ingrid murmured. ”It sounds _exactly_ like you, Sylvain.”

”Not you too, Ingrid!”

Felix’s attention remained fully on Dimitri’s face, and he couldn’t help the painful twist in his heart when he realized he finally recognized the childhood friend on this war-ruined man. The wistful glint in the one visible eye was far gentler, far more _him_ than what Felix remembered from before.

Why was it only in death that Dimitri regained himself? Bitterness filled Felix’s mouth again.

”I thought,” Dimitri said quietly, so quietly that only Felix heard it over Ingrid and Sylvain’s forced bickering, ”you all had died.”

Dimitri was looking at him directly now, and Felix tried to school his own expression into something harder, something that Dimitri wouldn’t be able to break apart. But as much as Felix prided himself for the distance he kept to people, Dimitri had never been distant from him, not even when Felix had tried his hardest. Same went with Ingrid and Sylvain, but it was only Dimitri Felix had tried to push away and failed spectacularly.

Well.

Felix supposed he had finally succeeded: Dimitri was going to leave him very soon.

The thought brought no joy, no mirth of any kind at finally ridding himself of the ghost that’d been pressing over him since Glenn’s death.

”As we all thought you did,” Felix said, something hollow in his chest and in his voice, ”but here you are, Dimitri.”

Dimitri looked at him, and something painfully adoring flickered through his gaze. Felix’s chest tightened, and Dimitri whispered a soft confession, ”I’ve been dead for a while now, Felix.”

”I know,” Felix said, and this time he sounded properly annoyed. ”I always knew.”

”You’re,” Dimitri said through a painful-sounding wheeze, face contorting, ”really here, aren’t you? You’re not… ghosts.”

The arm closest to Felix had begun to rise, the movement so shaky that it should have fallen right back to the ground.

But it didn’t.

Felix grasped Dimitri’s hand with his own, and didn’t know what to do with it. So he just held it as he stared into Dimitri’s war-exhausted eye and said, ”Do I _seem_ a ghost to you, boar?”

He squeezed Dimitri’s trembling hand, and Dimitri’s lips broke into a smile just as shaky. His eye glazed over with some feeling Felix didn’t bother decoding. Maybe death. Felix’s grip tightened at the mere thought just as Dimitri murmured, ”You called me Dimitri just earlier. I… liked that.”

_Stop it, _Felix wanted to say. _Stop saying that when you’re dying. Stop dying, you stupid idiot of a boar. Dimitri. _

Distantly, Felix realized Ingrid and Sylvain’s bickering had come to a halt, both their attentions on Dimitri and him now.

Felix didn’t need to say anything, when Dimitri was already heaving out more words, his hand tugging weakly at Felix’s. ”Would you… remove it? The eyepatch.”

It was difficult when he was holding one of Dimitri’s hands, so Sylvain took pity on Felix and went to slide the eyepatch off from covering the other eye. What was revealed underneath was not pretty, but it wasn’t like any of them had expected to realize that the eyepatch was merely an odd fashion statement.

Ingrid wheezed out a gasp, and Felix sensed Sylvain going stiff and tense at the sight of the hard-edged scar over where once a soft blue eye had been. Felix stared at it, pursed his lips at how Dimitri had changed in five years, before looking at the well-off eye again. Exhaustion was beginning to be replaced by the approaching death, and Felix’s hand curled tighter around Dimitri’s, as if it were a silent plea for Dimitri to stay.

”This is me,” Dimitri murmured, and his bloodied, bruised face contorted from an obvious wave of pain. Felix glanced down at the spears portruding from his chest, and grimaced. ”Ugly scars, from one time or another.”

Felix looked on impassively through the heartache. So much had been lost. So much was about to be lost. ”As if we didn’t know that already.”

”Ingrid,” Dimitri said, his gaze sliding away and giving Felix room to suck in a breath.

”Your Highness,” she said, but there was surprising hesitation in the title.

Dimitri’s laugh was mirthless this time. ”I have not been your prince for five years,” he said, his voice severe, ”so please. Do not call me that.”

”Dimitri,” she tried. It was a dying man in front of her, after all, Felix mused. She couldn’t very well ignore his wishes.

Dimitri’s hand stopped shaking as his body heaved with his relief at Ingrid’s compliance. ”Ingrid,” Dimitri repeated the name, reverent in the way that only a dying man was, ”never… ever become a knight that throws away her life. Be the knight that protects, and lives on to see another day. That… that is my dearest wish for you, friend.”

”Oh,” Ingrid whispered, and the pain was raw in her voice. ”Oh, Dimitri. I...”

”I often thought,” Dimitri murmured, ”I’d rather have Glenn surviving than me. But I’ll be joining him soon enough….”

”We’d rather you survive right now, buddy,” Sylvain interjected, and even his voice was as grim as the pitch black darkness in Felix’s heart. ”Though, I guess that’s a tall task right now.”

”It wouldn’t do any good even if I,” Dimitri grimaced through another wave of pain that had his hand squeeze Felix’s weakly, ”survived.”

”Dimitri...”

”And Sylvain,” Dimitri said, a weak smile tugging at his lips, ”please get a grip when I’m gone. Felix won’t be as easily coaxed into chasing girls with you.”

Sylvain’s sigh was as exasperated as it was sad. ”Really, Dimitri? Those are your last words to me? Not a tearful ’I admired you so much’ and ’you really saved my hide when I gave that Academy girl a dagger’?”

”I did _not_ give her a dagger,” Dimitri said weakly.

”I am still not convinced,” Sylvain said, and Felix tried to ignore the audible trembling in each word. Sylvain was usually much better at composing himself in serious moments… usually. But there was nothing usual about this whole situation.

Dimitri’s hand could no longer return Felix’s squeeze, and a strangling terror crept upon Felix. He had always said Dimitri had died the day the Tragedy took place, but he had never been prepared to actually--

The sense of loss tasted worse than the liquor Sylvain had offered him sometime ago to celebrate their successful defence of the monastery, but it burned Felix’s throat much the same way.

”Felix,” Dimitri murmured, and Felix’s stare refocused on the face now turned back toward him. Now, he noticed the dark circles under Dimitri’s eyes, and the splattered blood that could be his or someone else’s. A result of an uncontrolled hatred, Felix knew, and his chest constricted once more with guilt.

He shouldn’t have given up. He shouldn’t have left the Kingdom behind--

”Felix,” Dimitri repeated, and Felix felt like he was twelve again, trying to get into Dimitri’s room to sleep with him.

”Don’t–” When Felix looked at Dimitri again, he only saw the request in the one eye and in the nod towards the spears plunged into him. The words Felix had been about to say died on his lips, and anger flashed.

Anger was easier than grief. Easier than accepting that he was watching Dimitri die – and what Dimitri was asking from him.

”You’re always doing this,” Felix snapped. ”You’re always making me watch when you–when you--”

Dimitri’s face darkened with the weight of his regrets. ”I know.”

”I _gave up_ on you,” Felix snarled. His head buzzed with useless thoughts, none of which Felix could grasp and select to latch onto. Instinctively, he gripped Dimitri’s hand instead, like it could help him. ”Why are you still--”

”You’re here now,” Dimitri said, as if that was enough to make up for the fact that Felix hadn’t been at his side to push him towards a direction as he had before. Dimitri’s mouth curled into a weak smile his eye closed into. ”That is more than enough.”

Now, without his quest of revenge and the heavy blanket of hatred, Dimitri looked much smaller than a man of his size possibly could. So much older than the twenty-three years and some months he carried on his back.

So much more anguished than a man of his age ought to be – but really, that description fit Felix too. Even Sylvain, really. Not to mention Ingrid.

”You’re a damn idiot,” Felix told him, and it was the dullest insult he had ever given.

Dimitri’s breathing grew more laboured, and Felix’s shoulders sagged as he moved forward and brought his free hand to one of the spears stuck in Dimitri.

”I’m tired of looking at you,” he said harshly and tugged at the spear, pretending not to notice the quivering in his own voice. ”Begone, boar.”

The gratefulness on Dimitri’s face scorched Felix, and his eyes stung. Damn it all. Not like this. _Not like this._

Ingrid moved beside him. ”Felix--!”

”He’s dying either way, Ingrid,” Felix said, and this time the steel came into his voice easily. ”There’s no point in keeping death waiting.”

He thought of Glenn. Dimitri had said enough about the topic for him to know Glenn’s death had been agonizing – nothing like the glorious death Ingrid and Felix’s old man had forced themselves into picturing.

He had never thought he’d be forced to end Dimitri’s life himself to prevent that kind of death, as much as he had told the professor that he would be ready to do so if Dimitri really was alive.

It had been so much easier to put on that facade than it was to actually do it, but Felix knew he couldn’t dodge this duty that had landed on his unwilling self.

He tugged at the spear hard, and tried not to flinch at the deep grimace that twisted Dimitri’s face with pain. But even that, Felix reminded himself grimly, was nothing compared to the agony the man had been in before. It was like putting down an animal to relieve it of its pain.

The first spear came out cleanly enough despite the difficulty Felix’s scrouching position gave him, and with it a pool of blood that stained the ground and Felix’s already dirtied clothes.

”Oh, this is so hard to watch,” Ingrid mumbled somewhere distantly, and Felix only saw a vague blur by his side before Dimitri coughed, blood splurting past his lips as another spear was tugged harshly at.

”Ingrid,” Felix said. ”This isn’t your task.”

”Is it not?” Ingrid murmured. ”We’re all his friends, Felix. His subjects. Not just you.”

”She’s right, you know,” Sylvain said, and another spear began to rise from Dimitri’s chest, leaving the broken prince gasping and wheezing out more crimson colour. Felix hated that he couldn’t stop watching it. Sylvain’s voice continued, ”You don’t gotta shoulder the burden alone. Just as you shouldn’t have either, Dimitri.”

”Right as ever,” Dimitri chuckled through pain. His eye slid shut as his red-stained lips curled, revealing bloodied teeth. ”You do… have moments of… clear insight, my friend.”

”A dying man just insulted me,” Sylvain muttered without much annoyance. He grunted as he pulled the spear in his hands off Dimitri, plates of midnight metal falling with it to the ground. ”Well, still better than the time with Miklan, I suppose.”

Felix’s hand shook around the spear that had stuck into Dimitri’s side. ”For Imperial soldiers,” he muttered, ”they have absurdly bad aim.”

”Suffering _is_ the point,” Dimitri said, and indeed his voice sounded strung and laced with pain all around. Though, Felix supposed, the boar had been in pain all this time; only now was it leaking out with nothing barring it inside.

Only in death.

Felix tossed the spear aside as soon as he had pulled it out of Dimitri – the last of the four weapons that had pierced right through him. Felix found the number to be somewhat ironic: through Dimitri’s life, four people had affected him this badly.

His parents. Glenn.

Edelgard.

”You’re free now,” Felix said, voice strangled. Death was no salvation, and yet Dimitri looked like… as if, in his last moments, he’d been… Felix blinked away the burning sensation in his eyes. ”Don’t… waste your time haunting the Emperor as a ghost, you stupid boar.”

_Rest, Dimitri._

Dimitri’s face changed again as life was dripping out of him. Something painful and raw emerged, coated in nostalgia. ”I make no promises,” he murmured. His eye closed, and he choked out garbled syllables, ”Edel… El...”

Felix thought it strange, the hint of agonized affection that Dimitri’s voice held at the beginning of the Emperor’s name. But the thought quickly vanished as Dimitri’s hand found strength in the last moment to give his a squeeze, horribly weak but Felix caught the feeling regardless.

The last thing Dimitri would ever give him, the last thing Felix would ever reluctantly accept from him.

Years ago, Felix had accepted his death – and that had led to him joining Claude’s army earlier this passing year. Time better spent there than in the Kingdom looking pointlessly for a dead man, he had thought.

But now… face to face with Dimitri’s actual death, Felix wasn’t ready.

Even as he watched Dimitri’s facial muscles stop moving and his breath cease, he wasn’t ready.

”You stupid boar,” he whispered, and his heart stuttered from the weight of the grief settling into it. His hand clutched Dimitri’s unmoving one, and memories of much happier days flooded his mind until he dropped the hand just to avoid them.

Gronder Field around them hadn’t fallen silent for him and his grief, but it didn’t matter much as Felix could only feel the painful beating of his own heart and the press of his own gloved hand against his skin as he covered his face. The tears came unbidden, each one more bitter than the last, and Felix trembled at the side of his friend’s corpse.

A pair of hands descended onto his shoulders, surprisingly gently despite the callouses from years of spear-handling. They were not a noble lady’s hands, Felix had sneered at her sometime ago, but now he couldn’t bring himself to say anything close to that.

”Don’t– don’t touch me,” he said instead, all bite out of his strangled voice. His hand shook against his face.

”Felix,” she said, unbearably gentle and understanding even in her own grief. ”It’s okay to not deal with this alone. He… Dimitri… wouldn’t want you to.”

_You idiot,_ Felix wanted to say. _You can barely even utter his name without choking up yourself._

He couldn’t, though, as he shuddered with another soundless and embarrassingly watery gasp. Then, another’s hand came to grasp his free one – the one _not_ curling protectively to hide his crying face.

”We’re in this together, buddy,” Sylvain’s voice said, and Felix let his fingers coax their way between his own. No use pretending this ache away when he was surrounded only by people that knew him better than to fall for it.

So, there he was – kneeling beside the corpse of the friend he had failed, and who had failed _him_ in multiple ways, and falling apart at the seams as the remaining two of his childhood friends held him and grieved with him.

Where there once were four, only three remained.

And Felix couldn’t shake off the feeling that he could have prevented this.

The thoughts hadn’t stopped circling in Felix’s head by the time the army returned to the monastery, and so he spent far too much time walking restlessly around the place instead of training.

He had tried, but the attempts only brought up memories of earlier times. When Dimitri was…

Of course, his skulking around would attract the attention of their professor, whose name Felix had heard mentioned only a handful of times and he honestly couldn’t bother remembering right now. Professor came to him, an expectant but cautious expression on their face, and the words burst out of him before Felix could entirely think about what he was saying.

”Tell me,” he said, a little too recklessly, a little too demandingly even for himself. ”Had I stayed by his side, could I have saved him? _Stopped_ him?”

His professor’s face contorted, a subtle expression of grief that even they weren’t immune to, and their hand came to rest on Felix’s elbow. _Calm,_ the gesture said, but there was no calming the heaviness Dimitri’s lingering, dying gaze had left in him. Felix’s teeth caught his lower lip and bit down as the professor merely studied him with that quiet but sad gaze of theirs.

”We’ll never know now,” they said, in the end. ”You’re not the type to torture yourself with what-ifs, Felix.”

”Hah, what a hypocrite,” Felix sneered, without any real heat behind the words. ”You’re pondering it too, I can tell.”

Back during the Academy days, it had never been any secret that despite teaching the Golden Deer, the professor had always had a soft spot for Dimitri in particular. Always making sure Dimitri ate, always inviting him over for tea. Really, Felix had grown sick of watching Dimitri’s delighted faces at the professor’s unexpected attention, but now he wished for nothing more than to see him make those expressions again.

”After Glenn,” Felix said, more to himself than the other, ”I used to wonder. If it should have been me dying for Dimitri that day, you know. I’m not immune to those kinds of thoughts, professor – far from it.”

Before the professor could say anything else to that, Felix straightened himself and pushed the hand away from his elbow. ”I’ll… I need to be alone,” he muttered. ”You know where to find me.”

The professor only nodded, pulling their hand back to themselves. ”If you need to,” they said softly, ”it is perfectly fine to talk about your feelings.”

Felix snorted derisively as he stomped away. The _yeah, right_ remark didn’t need to be said aloud for the sarcasm of it to hang in the air.

He found himself on the roof of Garreg Mach, but so did two others – so much for the much needed solitude.

”Why are you here?” he asked, but didn’t turn around. Instead, he stared at the scenery down below him, at the merchants and their carriages, at the life that kept moving forwards in spite of those lost to death. Felix had resented that life after Glenn. Everything moved on at such a rapid pace, and death was tossed aside as an inconvenience or a service.

”Well, we obviously can’t leave you to wallow, now can we, Felix?” Sylvain sounded as carefree as ever, but there was weight in his words that resembled the one in Felix’s chest.

”I do not _wallow._”

”Yes, yes,” Ingrid’s voice joined in. The weariness in each word felt like a punch in the gut, and Felix grimaced. ”We’ll let you have your manly pride, or whatever it is, but we’re staying.”

”Do as you please,” Felix said and braced himself just in time for Sylvain’s arm that came around his shoulders and Ingrid’s hand that slipped to his narrow waist.

Squeezed between his childhood friends like this, Felix couldn’t help but think, _It should be you here, Dimitri._

How embarrassing it was, after all these years of thinking he was dead, to weep over Dimitri as if the sensation of the loss was new.

At least, this time, he wasn’t alone in grieving.

Somehow, and weirdly for a loner like himself, that brought a touch of relief unlike anything else. (Knowing Dimitri, the sight would make him smile in approval.)

But until the Empire went down, Dimitri wouldn’t be at peace. And neither would Felix.

_I’ll see to it,_ Felix thought as his friends huddled close to him like a protective blanket, _that your fight wasn’t for nothing, Dimitri._


End file.
